All sourdoughs started out as cheechakos, and for most of them, the sheer adventure of striking out into wilderness and making a home for themselves was enough to pull them off the trails and into the wilds of the state. Most were searching for a new life, far from civilization.

Sometimes they came back to tell about it, and sometimes they didn't.

Nineteen year old Chris McCandless lives in an abandoned bus in the shadow of Denali for an entire summer, then is found, starved to death by three moose hunters. How did he survive so long only to starve at the end of the summer? Krakauer retraces the last two years of Chris' life, starting from when he left home in Washington D.C., with a camera, an old car, and a determination to live life to the fullest.

Fred leaves his family in Maine to go to Alaska, intent on making some money and homesteading in the wilderness. He doesn't see them again for 17 years. Through trial and error he learns how to survive running a trapping line, whether its fending off grizzly attacks, or convincing the girl he loves to come into the wilds with him.

The year is 1927. A young school teacher from Colorado, searching for adventure, moves to the mining town of Chicken, Alaska. Anne Hobbs is only nineteen but she manages to make friends in the town, and make progress in the school. However, she is ostracized when she falls in love with an Athabaskan? man and adopts two orphaned Athabaskan children. This story of her struggle to survive and find acceptance is hard to put down!

In 1981 Rick Leo quit his job in New York and headed north to make a new life for himself, with $900 in his pocket and a very trusting girlfriend, Melissa, who also had just quit her job. After a short time in a borrowed cabin near Talkeetna, the send-off point for climbers of Denali, and another stint in Anchorage to make money, they have a baby and build a cabin of their own. Long after Melissa can't take it anymore, Rick stays on and raises their son Janus in the cabin.

Natalie Kusz and her family move to Delta, Alaska when she is only six years old, searching for freedom and a better way of life. They have been there just a short time when a neighbor's dog bites Natalie in the face several times. Her recovery takes years. At the same time, her family comes together and learns to survive the environment, intolerance of their Polish ancestory, and poverty.